By the time the afternoon comes, I’m desperate to see Matthew. The weather isn’t brilliant so I hang around in our room, waiting for his call to tell me what time he’ll be arriving. I watch a bit of television, relieved that there’s nothing on the news about Jane’s murder, yet strangely annoyed that two weeks on from her violent death, she’s already been forgotten.
The phone rings and I snatch it up.
“I’m at the house,” Matthew says.
“Good,” I say happily. “You’ll be here in time for dinner.”
“The thing is, when I arrived, there was a man here from that alarm company, practically sitting on the doorstep.” He pauses. “I didn’t realize you’d actually gone ahead with it.”
“Gone ahead with what?”
“Well, the alarm.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The guy said he agreed with you that someone would fit the alarm this morning but when the technician turned up there was nobody in. They’ve been phoning every half an hour, apparently.”
“I didn’t agree to anything at all,” I say, annoyed. “All I said was that we’d get back to him.”
“But you signed a contract,” Matthew says, sounding puzzled.
“I did no such thing! Be careful, Matthew, he’s trying it on, pretending I agreed to something when I didn’t. It’s a scam, that’s all.”
“That’s what I thought. But when I said that as far as I was concerned we hadn’t decided anything yet, he showed me a copy of the contract with your signature on it.”
“Then he must have forged it.” There’s a silence. “You think I went ahead and ordered it, don’t you?” I say, realizing.
“No, of course not! It’s just that the signature looked a lot like yours.” I sense him hesitate. “After I got rid of him I had a look at the brochure you left in the kitchen and, inside, there’s a client copy of the contract. Shall I bring it to the hotel so that you can see it? Then if it’s not aboveboard, we can do something about it.”
“Sue the pants off him, you mean,” I say, trying to lighten things, trying not to let any doubt cloud my mind. “What time will you be here?”
“By the time I’ve showered and changed—about six-thirty?”
“I’ll wait in the bar for you.”
I hang up, momentarily annoyed that he could think I’d order an alarm without telling him. But a little voice is mocking me: Are you sure, Cass, are you really sure? Yes, I tell it firmly, I am sure. Besides, the man from the alarm company had seemed like the type of person who would do anything to get a contract, even if it meant lying and cheating. I’m so confident I’m right that when I go down to the bar, I order a bottle of champagne.
It’s waiting in an ice bucket when Matthew arrives.
“Tough week?” I ask, because he looks horribly tired.
“You could say that,” he says, kissing me. He eyes the champagne. “That looks good.”
The waiter comes to open the bottle and serves us.
“To us,” Matthew says, raising his glass and smiling over at me.
“To us. And our suite.”
“You booked a suite?”
“It was all they had left.”
“What a shame,” he says, grinning.
“The bed is huge,” I go on.
“Not so big that I’ll lose you in it, I hope?”
“No chance.” I put my glass down on the table. “Have you got the copy of the contract I’m meant to have signed?” I ask, wanting to get it out of the way so that nothing can ruin our weekend away.
He takes a while taking it from his pocket and I know he doesn’t really want to show it to me.
“You have to admit it looks like your signature,” he says, apologetically, handing it across the table, and I find myself staring, not at the signature at the bottom of the page, but at the contract itself. Filled out in what is unmistakably my handwriting, it’s even more damning than my signature, at least from my point of view. Anybody could have forged my signature, but not the line after line of neatly completed spaces, each capital letter formed exactly as I would form it. I scan the page, looking for something to tell me that it wasn’t me who filled it in but the longer I look, the more convinced I am that it was, to the point where I can almost see myself doing it, I can almost feel the pen in my hand and my other hand resting lightly on the paper, anchoring it down. I open my mouth, prepared to lie, ready to tell Matthew that it definitely isn’t my handwriting but, to my horror, I burst into tears.
He’s beside me in a minute, holding me close. “You must have been tricked into signing it,” he says and I can’t work out if he really believes it or if he’s giving me a way out, just as he had only days before when he said he must have forgotten to tell me he was going to the rig. Either way, I’m grateful. “I’ll contact the firm first thing tomorrow and tell them there’s no way we’re going through with it.”
“But it’ll be their salesman’s word against mine,” I say shakily. “Let’s just leave it. He’ll only deny everything and it’ll only delay things. The fact is, we need an alarm.”
“All the same, I think we should try and get the contract canceled. What did he say, that it was just a quote or something?”
“I’m not sure what he actually said but, yes, I suppose I thought I was only agreeing to a quote,” I answer, grabbing at the excuse. “I feel so stupid.”
“It’s not your fault. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with using those sort of tactics.” He hesitates. “I’m not sure what to do now, to be honest.”
“Could we just let them install it, especially as I’m partly to blame?”
“I’d still like to have it out with him.” Matthew’s voice is grim. “Although the chances are, I won’t even see him tomorrow because they’ll send one of their technicians. He’s just the salesman.”
“I really am sorry.”
“I suppose in the great scheme of things it’s not such a disaster.” He drains his glass and looks at the bottle longingly. “Shame I can’t have another.”
“Why not? It’s not as if you have to drive anywhere.”
“Well, yes, I do. Because I thought everything was above-board, I agreed they could come and install it tomorrow morning. So if we’re not going to try and get it canceled, I have to be there for when they arrive.”
“Can’t you stay the night anyway and leave early?”
“What, at six-thirty in the morning?”
“You wouldn’t need to leave that early.”
“Well, I will if they’re going to be there at eight.”
I can’t help wondering if his refusal to stay the night is his way of punishing me because he won’t let himself be angry with me for ordering the alarm in the first place.
“But you will come back tomorrow evening, once they’ve finished?” I say.
“Yes, of course,” he says, taking my hand in his.
He leaves shortly after and I go up to my room and watch a film, until my eyes droop with tiredness. But I can’t sleep. The knowledge that I managed to fill in a whole contract without any recollection of doing so has shaken me to the core. I try to tell myself that I’m not doing anything as bad as Mum was when I first realized there was a real problem. It was in the spring of 2002—she’d gone to the local shops and had gotten lost on her way back home, only turning up three hours later. Before the alarm, it was only little things that slipped from my memory. Forgetting what I was meant to have bought for Susie, forgetting Matthew was going away, forgetting I’d invited Hannah and Andy for a barbecue, forgetting Rachel was coming to stay—all those things are bad enough. But ordering an alarm without realizing what I was doing is huge. I want to believe more than anything that the salesman tricked me into it. But when I think back to when we were in the kitchen together, I realize that I don’t remember very much at all—except at the end when he handed me the brochure and assured me that my husband would be impressed.